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FOOTBALL IN POOR HEALTH - 26-2-08
Louis Spence
There are far too many reasons not to like football these days. Pampered players, grasping semi-literate agents, idiotic wags, idiotic wages, health and safety rulings, exorbitant ticket prices, staggered kick off times, alleged instances of bung taking by loathsome managers...
Also for many years in English football we scoffed at the dominance of the Scottish duopoly of Celtic and Rangers, breached only briefly in my lifetime by Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen. Yet now we have our own perennial title chasers – our own elite of Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool.
At Middlesbrough we are proud to have probably the best chairman in the land in Boro born fan and saviour Steve Gibson. A self-made man with enormous wealth, even he has now stated what has been evident for far too long. There is an elite in the Premiership that makes the whole annual title chase an absolute mockery.
The rich get richer and the poor go to the wall. When the "Big Four" were sabre rattling and demanding ever more and more streams of revenue from the appeasers in charge and were threatening to break away into a European Super League, I just found it all so tiresome, short-sighted and not at all visionary.
What if they did decamp with the likes of Real, Juventus and AC Milan? I can tell you that the management of these super clubs would be sick as chips if their hitherto glory boys ended up bottom of the pile in their Super Euro League. Hello, someone has to.
Anything other than a top three placing in their new elite league would be psychologically disastrous for them. No matter if they won the damned super league they would still not be champions of their own country. Believe me, the breakaway group and its success-sated fans would miss English football far more than it would miss them.
All this talk of matches abroad. Get real! The extra money attracted would still go pro rata to the top boys so the effect is basically worse than it is at the moment for a nation reared in fair play and healthy competition.
It really is time that the powers that be displayed some sanity and stood up to the bully boys who want everything their own way. The combined attendances for the top four work out on average at 220,000. The other sixteen Premiership clubs make up to 492,000 and yet everyone is expected to kowtow to the big four.
We hear of the Premier League being the richest in the world. Maybe. But like some raddled old billionaire, it is rotten to the core and dying from within, displaying all the excesses that constitute the worst in the human condition.
Oh and by the way, football is a sport, not a product.
Can we please have some return to normality. Too much has been taken out of the game by those who have in many instances never even played it let alone paid to watch and support their team of birthright or choice for lifetimes.
Enough is enough. When Pele called football the beautiful game he surely cannot have ever dreamed that the world’s favourite sport would end up in the hand of greedy, grasping, unscrupulous snake oil salesmen and their toadying lackeys.
He was right of course. The game is beautiful. Even now. It is just the dross that has inveigled itself into every nook and cranny of the sport that makes the genuine fan despair.
Louis Spence.
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